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The same GTK project with a bug fix

radiodee1 — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:28:23 GMT

--10/25/2009--

There was this bug in my GTK project. The correct version number for a package didn't always show up. I fixed that in the most recent version.

Here's the link.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gaptsearch/

GAPTSEARCH
The idea behind this project is to have a way to search and display package information on a debian system, in a graphical way, without having to become root user.

As a consequence, the program I came up with is a search tool, but not a management tool. You can view all your package info but you cannot change your system. That's the way it's supposed to be, though, and I use the program frequently myself before and after I install software. I like to install software using aptitude from the command line, and this program helps me get the spelling of package names right when I'm typing. I leave it open on the desktop while I'm actually typing, and now I don't get my package names misspelled half as often.

The inspiration for the project was the synaptic program. I was pleased by the ability to enter the name (or part of the name) of the package you want to search for, and then getting a list of packages that match that search criteria. Synaptic, though, requires that you enter your root password. Also I believe it uses apt-get as a back end. I feel my program is better because it uses whatever package manager you want to actually install packages, and you don't need to log in as root.

The project uses apt-cache and aptitude commands internally to produce the various lists and descriptions. You can choose to search using either one.

It's called gaptsearch, which is the letter 'g' followed by the words 'apt' and 'search', and then all smushed together.

It is available on sourceforge as a tar ball or a i386 deb package. I've installed the deb on lenny and squeeze and in a VM on a ubuntu system. The tar ball is set up to produce a debian package. This is the procedure to make the package from the tar.gz package:

cd into the top level of the unpacked tar ball as regular user. Then execute the following commands.

Code:

./configure
fakeroot debian/rules binary

That's about it. The deb is created for you in the parent directory to the one you're in. The version I've committed most recently is 1.1.3-1 .

GTK project moved to Sourceforge

radiodee1 — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 15:22:07 GMT

--08/22/2009--

I've moved my project 'Gaptsearch' to Sourceforge. Here's a link to the project:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gaptsearch/

The idea behind the project is that I like to do all my updates with 'aptitude' from the command line, but at the same time I like a gui for searching through the project database. To this end I made such a gui, called 'gaptsearch', for doing this display work. I don't use the aptitude ncurses interface.

The current version of gaptsearch searches the application database using aptitude or apt-cache (you can specify which) and displays the output on the screen without invoking the commands as root.

Gaptsearch does not execute any of the commands 'update', 'upgrade', 'remove' or 'install' and in that sense really isn't a package management tool.

At this time there's a deb file available for i386 and also a source tarball which has the debianized sources and makefiles. This tarball can be used to create your own deb package. During the build process you will need 'build-essential', 'fakeroot', and possibly other glade and gtk packages.

My system is debian testing/unstable, so the deb file works for testing. I have also tested the deb on lenny and ubuntu 9.04 and it seems to work in both cases.

This software is free but I recommend interested parties read the licensing material. There is no warranty, not even the implied warranty of "MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."

GTK Project on Launchpad

radiodee1 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:18:32 GMT

--6/22/09--
I've started a C project on Launchpad. It's called gaptsearch. Hopefully no one else has used that name. Here is a link to the launchpad site:

https://launchpad.net/gaptsearch

There are no debs available, but if you have an environment where you can use simple Makefiles you can probably compile it. As of this writing I'm using debian squeeze, and the glade package, so if your system is up to these specs you probably won't have any trouble. Here is the launchpad blurb describing the project:

Quote:

gaptsearch is a gtk program that displays the output of different apt based commands without invoking the commands as root user. It is meant for debian based systems and is strictly for gathering info about your system setup. It does not, for example, perform "install" or "remove" commands and therefore is not really a package *management* tool.

The most recent version installs the program (a single executable) in the directory "/usr/local/bin/". The program displays information that it amasses from the various debian package management tools on your system.

--7/01/09--
I've added files and folders allowing for a debian package to be built from the program sources. You download and unpack the most recent sources and then execute the following commands:

Code:

$ ./configure
$ fakeroot debian/rules binary

Then you switch to the parent directory and install the deb package as usual with the dpkg command as root:

Code:

# dpkg -i gaptsearch*.deb

Sound notification when email is recieved (gnome - evolution)

radiodee1 — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:18:33 GMT

--6/11/2009--
This is a duplication of some of the posts I made to the debian forum on LinuxQuestions, as well as some new material. What follows immediately is the first post to the thread. After that I skip around the thread a little. I've purposely only duplicated my own posts here, though some of the others were interesting. To read the original thread go to this link:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-gnome-729282/

--5/29/2009--
I use sqeeze and a little bit of sid. I also use evolution and gnome. I was going through different preferences and I found that if you go to "System->Preferences->Sound" there is a tab that has options for different alerts and sound effects that you can have your system play when certain actions take place. I want to make it so that a sound plays whenever I receive a new email, BUT on my system everything in this tab of the "Sounds Preferences" dialog box is grayed out. I cannot figure out how to get those options un-grayed.

I can clearly see (in the grayed out material) that there is an option for getting notification when mail is received. How do I do this?

When I click the "help" button on the dialog I get a help window that tells me, among other things, that:

Quote:

You must select the Enable sound server startup option, and the Sounds for events option before you can access the Sound Events tabbed section.

How do I do that? They also mention a "General" tab, which I cannot even find. The only tabs I have are "Devices" and "Sounds". Has anyone else had this experience or anything like it? Thanks.

--5/30/2009--
I googled a little and found someone tried to use gconf to change the keys directly. I went to the key at "/apps/evolution/eplugin/mail-notification" and entered a value in the spot marked "sound-file". I used "/usr/share/sounds/email.wav" but no sound played when I received an email. I find navigating around gconf to be difficult and so I might have missed something.

--6/01/2009--
I got it to work. I installed pulseaudio-esound-compat, as I use pulseaudio (I guess I didn't even know) and restarted and it worked. The sound plays that I specified in gconf. The "Sounds" tab of "System->Preferences->Sound" is still grayed out.

--6/10/2009--
I revisited this thing with the sounds because I wanted to remove pulseaudio and have it still work. I removed all pulseaudio packages and the email notification sounds stopped. I was back where I started, so I googled more and found this on a Ubuntu launchpad site:

Quote:

Gnome 2.24 uses a different framework for playing sound events called libcanberra. Libcanberra will not play any sound themes unless it can find the freedesktop sound theme to fall back on, in the event that a sound for a particular event cannot be found.

Ubuntu currently doesn't have this theme in a stand-alone package in the archive. It has been packaged for Debian, however it has been rejected for licensing reasons.

This explains why the "sounds" tab on the gnome-sound-properties dialog box is greyed out. Reading further, someone explains how to get the sounds to work using a 'freedesktop.org' theme. First download the file from here:

http://0pointer.de/public/sound-them...desktop.tar.gz

Then the author did this:

Quote:

extract to /usr/share/sounds and then could get some of the sounds working.

I tried this and it worked for me. Now my sound notification works under alsa, and the "sounds" tab is no longer grayed out. This is the page that has all the original info on it:

https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/281044

EDIT: I'm wrong again. In fact installing those files un-grays the "sounds" dialog, but it doesn't make the sounds audible. I'm gonna have to do more messing with these sounds.

--6/11/2009--
I found this link today:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=530793

It's a bug report for evolution that basically says that the "Mail Notification" plugin for evolution is broken, or at least seems to be. The funny thing is that I got something to work when I had pulseaudio installed.

Trying to make sense of it all:
The gnome-sound-properties dialog from gnome 2.24 doesn't work because the freedesktop.org sound theme could not be downloaded from the debian sites (due to licensing problems). If, however, you download the theme seperately the gnome-sound-properties dialog becomes active. You can then setup your system to play sounds for different desktop events, and you can even change which sounds get played with which events. Unfortunately the "Email Notification" event doesn't work. Why? I'm not sure.

The gnome-sound-properties dialog box is part of the package "gnome-control-center", and this is part of the 2.24 release of gnome. Evolution is, as of this writing, part of the 2.26 release of gnome. Maybe this explains why the gnome-sound-properties dialog plays sounds for most every desktop action except evolution mail notifications.

When I managed to get the sound notification to work with pulseaudio, this was probably a result of the interaction between pulseaudio and the evolution plugin for email notification, not the gnome-sound-properties program. This is because the key that I modified in the gconf database was called "/apps/evolution/eplugin/mail-notification". This plugin may have interacted directly with pulseaudio, not messing with gnome-sound-properties or canberra.

Finally, as an aside, I found that if you go to the gconf key at "/desktop/gnome/sound" you can set the "enable_esd" checkbox and thereby get sounds at login and logout. This may be similar to what happens when you install the debian package for that purpose.

--6/18/2009--
Today I was looking at the gnome site and their description of the 2.26 release and especially the sound preferences. "gnome-control-center" is in unstable now, so I installed it. At first I was disappointed because there was not "gnome-sound-properties" to be found. Then I installed pulseaudio again. The volume control program ("gnome-volume-control") automatically became more complicated when I installed pulseaudio, resembling what I had found on the Gnome 2.26 web site. I was a little happier.

I went to evolution and turned on the Mail Notification plugin and selected a ".wav" file (only .wav would work) and restarted the computer. The file played when I received mail. My only problem was that the pulseaudio sound preferences would set all the audio outputs to "mute" every time I restarted the computer. Manually I needed to change the mute and output level if I wanted to hear any audio at all. I found, though, the option for "Simultaneous Output to HDA ATI SB" worked, and after setting that the output levels were persistent after a restart.

--6/20/2009--
I'm wrong again. Under the "Output" tab I have three options. One is "HDA ATI SB" and one is "Simultaneous Output to HDA ATI SB". I thought the one "Simultaneous Output..." was the better one, but may not be. The notification sound doesn't play for that one. The "HDA ATI SB" option is good because the notification sound plays, but the output levels aren't persistent after a restart, as I noted above. I guess I'll stick with that, though, until I can figure something else out.

Moving Root To A Larger Partition

radiodee1 — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:22:52 GMT

I wanted to set up the root hard drive on a 20GB partition. It was previously on a 10GB partition. The first thing I did was to make sure the 20GB partition was empty. Then my plan was to copy all important files to the new partition and change the Master Boot Record so that it pointed to the new copy. Along the way I'd have to change the /etc/fstab file along with the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

First I switched to a terminal, by typing ctrl-alt-F1. Then I stopped GDM. This is what I typed:

Code:

# /etc/init.d/gdm stop

Then I tried ctrl-alt-F7 to see if Gnome was cancelled. I don't remember exactly what I did, but I made sure that 'root' was the only one logged in by checking the screen at ctrl-alt-F7. Then I went back to ctrl-alt-F1 as root and unmounted all the other partitions. My /home directory is on another partition, so I remmoved it. This is the command I used:

Code:

# umount /home

I used similar commands to unmount the other partitions on my system. Then I went to /mnt and made sure there was a mount point called /mnt/format. This I use for occasions exactly like this one. I mounted the new blank directory, in this case called /dev/sda9, at /mnt/format. I cd'd into /mnt/format to see if everything was as it should be. These commands would do that:

Code:

# mount /dev/sda9 /mnt/format
# cd /mnt/format
# ls

The last command 'ls' would show the contents of the newly mounted partition. In this case it was just the directory 'lost+found'. After that I started copying the file system over to the new partition. This process takes a long time. You want to make sure that you use the '-p' option with the copy command in this case. It preserves the file's 'mode, ownership, and timestamps'. This way if the file was owned by root in the original directory, it will still be owned by root in the copy. I also think the '-v' option is essential. That way you can see if the files are being copied, or if not, exactly where in the process they are being held up.

Code:

# cp -rpv / /mnt/format/

As I said, this took a long time. At one point the copy command started copying the /proc file system. I just let it go, till finally it hung on /proc/kmsg. I had to stop it. After that I had to go back to the root directory and figure out what had been copied and what hadn't. I used two commands like this, and then I compared the results.

Code:

# ls /
# ls /mnt/format/

If it looked like I had missed something, I went back and copied it to the new partition. You can list several directories at once in the 'from' portion of the copy command. I looked in the 'man cp' page for this kind of info. You just have to separate the directories with spaces. At the command line I typed something like this. As you can see I just ignored the /proc file system. I think as long as a mount point exists for it, it doesn't need any contents:

Code:

# cp -rpv /bin /usr /mnt/format/

Then I waited a long time. When I was done I edited the /mnt/format/etc/fstab file so that (1) the right partition was listed as the root partition, and (2) the partition that used to be empty and that I was now using for the new root filesystem was not mounted by accident somewhere else on the filesystem.

Then I edited the /mnt/format/boot/grub/menu.lst file so that (1) the grub root directory was listed as the new partition -- in this case the line read 'groot=(hd0,8)' since the new partition was /dev/sda9, -- and (2) the root partition on the 'kernel' line was specified as '/dev/sda9' just like it should be. Actually, I edited the menu.lst file in two places as shown below. The hash symbols are part of the file and not a command line prompts -- you're not supposed to remove them:

Code:

...
## default kernel options
# kopt=root=/dev/sda9 ro
...

and

Code:

...
## default grub root device
# groot=(hd0,8)
...

After this I had 'update-grub' apply the info to the remainder of the file. This I did by using the 'chroot' command and then the 'update-grub' command like so. In this case the hash symbols are command line prompts:

Code:

# chroot /mnt/format
# update-grub

Then I used grub to setup the Master Boot Record. I did this while I was in the chroot environment, but I don't think I had to. Grub has a command line syntax similar to a command shell like 'bash' or 'sh'. You start by invoking grub, then you type your command line arguments, then you exit by typing quit. The 'root' command below tells grub which partition grub is supposed to go on, and the 'setup' command tells grub which MBR to edit. I'm not sure if the 'root' command was neccissary in my case, but I used it anyway.

Code:

# grub
> root (hd0,8)
> setup (hd0)
> quit
#

Then you should be able to type 'exit' to get you out of the chroot environment and then 'reboot' to boot into your new root partition. In reality I had some trouble. It turns out that I typed the syntax to the setup command wrong, so the grub program didn't write the MBR right. Then I tried to reboot and my system hung. I was able to boot up to a live CD, in this case I tried both the debian live CD and also the GParted live CD. Then I created a mount point, mounted the newly copied partition, and tried grub again. Ultimately it worked. When I used grub the second time I used the '--verbose' flag. This way I was more sure that I had accomplished my goal with the 'setup' command.

Code:

# grub --verbose
> root (hd0,8)
> setup (hd0)
> quit
#

If you're typing in the commands right there's alot of hexadecimal output on the screen. If you're typing the commands wrong, the shell tells you it doesn't understand the arguments. You could, of course, type the syntax right but get the numbers wrong. I also tried a command called 'grub-install' but I think it was not needed.

test post

radiodee1 — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:36:30 GMT

this is a test post.

linux-image-2.6.24-rc8 and wireless

radiodee1 — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 12:17:50 GMT

--Dell Laptop: linux-image-2.6.24-rc8 and wireless 1/26/08--

I bought a wireless router. I dual boot windows and linux on my laptop. I was getting good reception with windows, but not with linux, so I decided that I needed to try out different options with my wireless to try to get better reception.

I was using bcm43xx, but as I say, the signal was always week. I tried out ndiswrapper. I had tried out ndiswrapper once before without success, but they are constantly updating the code, so I thought there was a chance that it would work now, even though it really really didn't work before. I was no more successfull the second time.

I was fairly desperate, and I had read that the newest kernels (2.6.24) had code in them that was entirely re written for broadcom wireless chips. The old module, called bcm43xx was being replaced by new code, called b43. I went and downloaded a stock kernel from the debian kernel trunk. This area on the internet is above 'experemental' in the debian hierarchy of testing and research. I had read good things about this kernel, but I really didn't know if it would work. I didn't even know if the b43 module would work at all, let alone give my linux installation better wifi reception.

It worked well. I downloaded the pre-built kernel and installed it with the 'dpkg' command. I restarted my computer and the wireless signal came in strong from some distance right away. I wanted, though, to get all of my software to work on one kernel, so I needed the kernel headers. They're important as they allow special modules to be compiled against the kernel, allowing your special software to run. The problem was the headers were ready, but another package, called linux-kbuild, wasn't ready, and this package was a dependency of the linux-headers package. I could download the headers, and I did, but I couldn't install them.

I posted on my favorite forum and asked if anybody knew how to compile and build the linux-kbuild package. I was told the easiest thing to do would be to build your own kernel along with your own headers. I was told to do it the debian way, and then I'd have a linux-image package and a linux-headers package and they'd depend on my current version of linux-kbuild. This is what I set about doing.

First of all, I didn't do all this in one day. I tried out the kernel from the 'trunk' and posted to the forum on one evening. The next day I found out that the kernel had been moved from the 'trunk' area to the 'expermental' area. This meant that the source version of the kernel was available as a debian package. I had fairly good internet access at that point - since I was using the binary version of the kernel I had installed the previous day - so I downloaded the source. At that point I made some mistakes.

The reccomended process is to download the source package and install it. Then go to /usr/src and locate the source tarball. Unapck the tarball and go into the directory that 'tar' creates. Configure the kernel somehow, and then build the kernel. If you do it the debian way, you create a debian package automatically at the end of the build process. Take this package and install it. Similarly a debian package for the headers files is created automatically if you want it to be. Install this too.

One problem I had, looking back, is that I probably deleted or moved the kernel 'source' directory after I finished building the kernel. This was what I think I did the first time I tried the process. Sometimes this can be a problem, and if you don't plan ahead and build your kernel where you want the final source code to stay after you're done with the building, you could have problems when you try to build your modules.

The other thing I did was I built the kernel in the /usr/src/ directory, and to do that you need to be the root user. This was not a problem, but it probably would have been more elegant to build the kernel as a regular user and only install it as root. This is what the fakeroot command is for. I didn't use it the first time I built the kernel.

So the first kernel I downloaded helped out my wireless situation, but had no headers. That took all of ten minutes to download, but a little bit longer to configure. The second 2.6.24-rc8 kernel I had I built, and I built it with the headers for it, but I couldn't install the headers properly because - I think - I replaced some essential symbolic link during the build process or I moved the kernel source after I built it. That took about an hour. The third 2.6.24-rc8 kernel I had, and the one I'm keeping, I built from the same source as the second one. I compiled the whole thing using fakeroot, and then installed it as root. It worked well.

EDIT: Later the kernel 2.6.24 moved into testing and I would install the official debian binary.

New Computer -- Changing Grub with 'noapic nolapic'

radiodee1 — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:43:41 GMT

This text originally comes from somewhere else. On top of that it's outdated, as the current kernel in lenny has passed the kernel being written about in this post. However the post shows a couple of things, like how to edit the kernel line in grub, and that the 'noapic nolapic' option was necessary for the 2.6.22 kernel for the Inspiron 1521. Also of note with regard to this post is that I only have dial-up internet access at home. I had to go someplace else and find a wireless hotspot for broadband access. This was a major obstacle.

--Changing Grub with 'noapic nolapic'--
When I first installed debian on this computer it was Etch, or 'stable'. Installation itself went smoothly and pretty quickly. Immediately I found out I didn't have sound, modem, or screen resolution. This was all after installation. Installation itself went pretty well. The installer did its job, and the kernel booted up right away after installing.

I decided I wanted to get newer software to address some of my problems. The way to do this was to get the wireless to work and then go someplace that had wireless routers and then do a dist-upgrade. My strategy was to get a newer kernel. I went to unstable, and then also to backports to get a 2.6.21, and then a 2.6.22 kernel, but I had problems right away. They installed right, but they didn't boot right. They took up to 15 minutes to boot. Then when they were booted they acted wrong. The screen would freeze until I pressed a key or used the mouse.

I found out much later that I could get the kernel to work by passing two parameters to it on the kernel line of the boot loader. These two parameters were 'noapic' and 'nolapic'. After that the computer would boot up quickly and respond normally while operating. The parameters effect how the computer handles interrupt requests, and my modification probably made my computer a little slower. It also effectively removed one of my processors -- one of two.

The file that has to be edited is located at '/boot/grub/menu.lst' and the new kernel entry looks like this:
=============================================
title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.22-2-k7
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-2-k7 root=/dev/sda7 ro noapic nolapic
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-2-k7
savedefault
=============================================
Notice the end of the line that starts out 'kernel'. It says 'noapic nolapic'. I'm hoping that after the newest kernels are added to Lenny, I won't have to pass the kernel 'noapic nolapic' any more, but that might not happen.

EDIT: my last comments reflect my opinion at the time, not knowing that the kernels that would later be released for lenny would all work on my system. At this point I was still using bcm43xx for any wireless internet connection.

New Computer -- Upgrade to Lenny

radiodee1 — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:59:13 GMT

--New Computer : Upgrade to Lenny--

So I had the wifi working with bcm43xx, and I had two systems, one amd64 and one i386. I went over to a friends house and updated to lenny on both systems. At the time the i386 system was still almost unusable because of the time it took to boot up, nearly 10 minutes. I changed the 'sources.list' file on both partitions. After a long time running 'aptitude update' and 'aptitude full-upgrade' I got both installations up to a current version of lenny. It was hard because the wireless with bcm43xx was not always stable. It dropped out alot. This was the best thing for my computer, though. The sound and video support I needed wasn't in etch yet, so even though some of the time it wasn't even in lenny, there was at least a chance that waiting for it I might finally get the support and still get the benefit of the debian package system. There was no chance for new software in etch.

Later on the issue with the kernels booting up so horribly was solved, and at some point bcm43xx was replaced with b43 -- which was a tremendous difference for me. Even later the fglrx driver and the alsa drivers required would show up in lenny. I do not believe these things exist in etch, so I'm convinced that if you have an Inspiron 1521 right now, when etch is stable and lenny is testing, that testing is the way to go for you.

Here's a partial list of the Computer's hardware as listed on the packing slip for the sake of googlers:

Inspiron 1521, AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50 (1.6 GHz/512KB)
1 GB, DDR2, 667MHz 2 Dimm
15.4 Inch Wide Screen WXGA LCDTrueLife for Inspiron 1521
ATI RADEON Xpress1270 HyperMemory, Inspiron 1521 (Integrated)
160G 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
Integrated 10/100 Network Card and Modem for Inspiron
8X DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Drive
Integrated High Definition Audio 2.0
Dell Wireless 1390 802.11 Mini Card
Integrated 2.0M Pixel Webcam for I1521

This is the audio card 'snd-hda-intel':
$lspci | grep Audio
00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia

This is the webcam:
$lsusb
Bus 006 Device 003: ID 05a9:2640 OmniVision Technologies, Inc.
...

New Computer -- Inspiron 1521

radiodee1 — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:48:23 GMT

This post was written previously. I include it here so that maybe other people can benefit from this long story of how I got my laptop to finally work, and because I like posting to blogs.

--New Computer--
Well, I've got a new computer. It's a Dell Laptop Inspiron 1521. It's great, but now I'm trying to put linux on it. I'm using debian linux, and my goal is to run 'lenny', or what they also call 'testing'. I still have dial-up at home, but the computer has a wireless card, so if I can get that to work I can use the computer at friend's houses and at the school library. That would be how I would keep the computer up to date with new software.

Don't pay too much attention to the date at the top of these posts. My writing and posting are not happening at the same time. This is my 'to-do' list.

Basic Installation
What Works and What Doesn't
First Modifications

--Basic Installation--
Well, the computer has alot of features, some of which I'll list here. It's an amd64 processor, and it's got a 160 GB hard drive, 1 GB ram, and a wifi card. It's also got a built in Network Interface Card and a built in modem. It's got a built in web cam, which I never thought I'd get to work. It's also got built in speakers and ports for camera memory cards. It's got a DVD-R/W drive, and four USB ports. It has a video output connector for an external monitor, and a touchpad in place of a mouse. The screen can display 1280 x 800. The computer came with Windows Vista pre-installed, but without the actual vista disks. Instead the operating system software was saved on one of the partitions that the computer came with, in what must be almost pristine form.

My first move was to divide up the hard drive so I could put linux on it. I wanted to give Windows Vista 30 or 40 GB of space and keep the rest for linux. That wasn't to be. Vista wouldn't let me cut it's size down to less than half, because of restrictions placed on the system by the backup software. This way I only had 80 GB to work with.

I divided the remaining space into smaller partitions, about 10 GB for my first linux operating system, and about 35 GB for my home directory, and I installed the current stable distribution of debian, called 'etch'. I had this software from when I installed etch on my desktop computer almost a year previously, and it's the same software I mention in the post below.

--What Works and What Doesn't--
Nothing works. I got the graphics to work in a way. They show up in 1024x768. This allows me to do things like browse files, and view web pages, but when I started the modem didn't work either, so I could only view pages I had saved previously. I start moving things back and forth between my old computer and the new one with an USB data key. I also use the key to move files between my Vista installation and my linux installation... on the same machine, the laptop.

I find out that the modem in my laptop uses the conexent hsf modem, which is ironic because that's the same driver I used on my desktop. I didn't think you would be able to use that driver on a laptop. The driver worked great and I could check my email and surf a little from the laptop.

The sound doesn't work, and I don't know how to get the wifi card working. From googleing I find that some people have gotten the sound to work by plugging external speakers into the headphone jack. This works. I find later that I have to wait for a later version of alsa to get more functionality out of the speakers.

--First Modifications:--
Originally, I would go to school and use their wifi connection, and download software using vista. Then I'd put it on the data key and install it at home or rarely, on the spot. This is how I planned to get the wifi to work. The next step I felt was to go to someone else's home and do a massive download, and thereby update my computer to software that was more recent and possibly that would allow me to get more of my hardware running. That was the plan, but I really didn't know that alot of this software was going to be that helpful. I didn't know if it would really solve my problems. I wanted to update to 'lenny' and I was hoping that the software in the lenny distribution would be advanced enough to fix my problems, but I wasn't sure.

So my first priority after the modem was the sound and the video. Neither of those was addressable, so I went on to the wifi. I had two (or so) good html pages describing how to set up wireless using ndiswrapper and bcm43xx.

I started with ndiswrapper but it just wouldn't work. I did alot of posting on the internet forums. I also tried both the normal version of ndiswrapper that comes with etch as well as downloading the latest sources from the ndiswrapper site. Nothing worked for me. I blame the failure on the drivers. I don't feel the exactly correct driver exists for my card... or maybe for this computer. I got the drivers that I could get ahold of installed correctly, but ultimately could not get the software to perform simple tasks like changing the essid. Ndiswrapper never worked out for me.

My other option was to get bcm43xx to work. First I tried it with the kernel I had, a 2.6.18 kernel. I even built my own version of the same kernel, making sure that bcm43xx was turned on. That didn't work. Then I tried stock kernels from backports and testing. These were 2.6.21 and 2.6.22 kernels. I had big problems, though, as the two were taking a long time to boot up. Then the computer would act strangely after they finally did boot up. I found out later that this was due to the interrupts, and that I had to add 'noapic nolapic' to the kernel lines in grub, but I didn't know this at first. The 2.6.18 kernel was booting fine, and the higher versions were booting terribly and acting strangely. I would get bcm43xx to work with these kernels, but they were too unstable to really use all the time. Plus the use of them was really inconvenient. It would take up to 10 minutes to boot. I'd have to have alot of free time on my hands when I wanted to use wireless anywhere.

Around this time I decided to try the amd64 distribution. This wasn't easy, as I had to download a early version of the operating system and upgrade as I had been doing by using the vista operating system on my laptop. When I finally got a 2.6.21 kernel on there it worked well without special parameters. I was using amd64 and i386 operating systems at once -- dual booting. I actually did a dist-upgrade at someone's house on both operating systems, the i386 acting buggy throughout when it was it's turn. Later I would learn about turning off 'apic' and since then I use the i386 most of the time, but at that time if I wanted to use i386 I'd boot up with the 2.6.18 kernel. I updated a couple of times like this at the same friend's house.

It was a real option just to stick with amd64, but I couldn't get the java settup to work right, especially eclipse, which I expected to use for a class, so in the end I had to keep both operating systems. Now I use the 2.6.22 i386 kernel mostly. It boots up fine, and the only shortcoming is that it uses only one of the two processors in the cpu. I don't notice the difference, and the laptop in general is faster than my old desktop. With the release of a newer kernel I was able to stop using the 'noapic nolapic' option, and I believe that my system runs faster for it.

More to follow regarding sound and video.